Here is a fine post by Rod Dreher at Crunchy Con, writing about Andrew Bacevich’s article in The American Conservative, on how the conservatives since Reagan have actually pursued policies inimical to true conservatism. He’s asking for conservatives to comment on the article; conservative Vox Nova readers, please do!
A selection from Bacevich:
For conservatives to hope the election of yet another Republican will set things right is surely in vain. To believe that President John McCain will reduce the scope and intrusiveness of federal authority, cut the imperial presidency down to size, and put the government on a pay-as-you-go basis is to succumb to a great delusion. The Republican establishment may maintain the pretense of opposing Big Government, but pretense it is.
Social conservatives counting on McCain to return the nation to the path of righteousness are kidding themselves. Within this camp, abortion has long been the flagship issue. Yet only a naïf would believe that today’s Republican Party has any real interest in overturning Roe v. Wade or that doing so now would contribute in any meaningful way to the restoration of “family values.” GOP support for such values is akin to the Democratic Party’s professed devotion to the “working poor”: each is a ploy to get votes, trotted out seasonally, quickly forgotten once the polls close.
Above all, conservatives who think that a McCain presidency would restore a sense of realism and prudence to U.S. foreign policy are setting themselves up for disappointment. On this score, we should take the senator at his word: his commitment to continuing the most disastrous of President Bush’s misadventures is irrevocable. McCain is determined to remain in Iraq as long as it takes. He is the candidate of the War Party. The election of John McCain would provide a new lease on life to American militarism, while perpetuating the U.S. penchant for global interventionism marketed under the guise of liberation.
The essential point is this: conservatives intent on voting in November for a candidate who shares their views might as well plan on spending Election Day at home. The Republican Party of Bush, Cheney, and McCain no longer accommodates such a candidate.
This reminds me of my favorite book on American Politics: John Lukacs, A New Republic. It’s a terrific history and interpretation on how the United States, from Wilson on, became a thoroughly different nation than the one the founders brought about. (Although mutatis mutandis, something similar could be said for Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln in my opinion. Plus the U.S.A. of the Declaration of Independence was a different kind from the U.S.A. of the Constitution, something a lot of people forget as well.)
He points to bureaucracy, imperialism, populism, and “popular culture” as the culprits. I won’t try to summarize the book; run don’t walk to the bookstore and pick it up! Here’s a selection, which sure seems to apply forcefully to G.W. Bush (Lukacs has long been a conservative critic of Reagan’s so-called “conservatism”; he is critiquing Reagan here):
That the transformation of the American presidency to a publicity enterprise is inseparable from the existence of such a vast ‘executive’ bureaucracy should now be obvious. In the Middle Ages, indeed, until about the seventeenth century, kings had no cabinets; they depended on councils of advisers. In the second half of the twentieth century the elective monarchy of the American presidency assumed more and more of the characteristics of medieval kingship, with the liege lords having the power of determining access to the monarch, to the extent that even cabinet officers could no longer see the President on their own, that is, without the consent of the aforementioned liege lords who determined not only what and whom the President should see but also what he should hear — and perhaps, subsequently, think. That such a near-absolute preoccupation with publicity involves an underestimation of the character (and implicitly, of the necessary intelligence) of the elected President — as well as of the American people — should be obvious too.
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